Yeehaw! It’s time to head out west and make a life for yerself! I’m going to be taking a look at Cattle Country, a cozy little farming sim developed by Castle Pixel and published by Playtonic Friends. Set in the 1890s, your character has moved out west to farm and establish a life for themselves.
Starting out
While Cattle Country is primarily (and perhaps most accurately) described as a farming simulator, there’s a wide variety of other activities for you to enjoy. A non-exhaustive list of things to do include fishing, mining, logging, and crafting. If you like chill low-stakes resource gathering, then this is right up your alley. You can go underground and tap into mineral resources, or you can do what I did and immediately set up the crops and tools necessary to produce your own beer. Cheers!
For all that Cattle Country has going, it can be incredibly slow to start. The first few minutes of gameplay are about what you expect: an introduction to your new home. Then you’ve got the entirety of the game’s mechanics dumped on you in one go. An NPC will give a basic rundown of living out west, talking about tending to crops, keeping animals, and more. Then he throws just about every starting tool at you. If you’re ADHD like me, you will try to focus on this, but will end up skipping the text. There’s no real tutorial outside of a simple starting task, so either pay attention to what’s said or figure it out as you go along.
After this exposition, you’re more or less given free reign. The gameplay loop can become a bit tedious for a while until you reach an event or make progress on a task. Maybe that’s the goal: slow and cozy, but I was left a little underwhelmed. Had the explanatory text been spread out over time, I think much of this monotony would’ve been avoided. From a gameplay design standpoint, tutorials are much more effective when they are presented as needed, rather than explained all at once.
Gameplay
Crafting and resource gathering is a big part of this game. With enough time, you can make your dwelling all nice and upgrade your operation, but you probably won’t see immediate progress. Like I said, the gameplay pace can drag. Cattle Country moves a bit slower than most games with these sorts of crafting mechanics. In something like Minecraft, you’re incentivized immediately to upgrade and change up your equipment. That gets the player right into the gameplay loop and keeps them playing. This isn’t to say that Cattle Country isn’t engaging—it can be as engaging as you want, but the system can be a bit grindy.
Take for example the tools you use. The player starts out with a stone hoe, pickaxe, axe, and scythe. If you want to upgrade to an iron pickaxe you need to make some iron bars. In order to get those iron bars, you first need iron ore. Each iron bar requires 5 ore, so you’ll need quite a lot. Once you’ve wandered all around the map or in caves in search of ore, you can smelt it. This can be a painfully slow process. If a tool requires 10 iron bars… it gets a bit repetitive.
There’s an impressive variety of crops and animals to raise, but farming does take quite a bit of time and effort. Crops require watering each day and will take a number of days before they’re ready to harvest. Doesn’t sound like much, but if you’re starting out, it takes little time to tend to your crops, leaving the rest of the day pretty open. This might not sound like an issue, but it can leave you feeling like you’re waiting around. You can go off and do other things to fill the time, but if you’re focused on trying to farm, it can feel like you’re doing everything but what you set out to do.
Your community
Outside of mining and crafting (chicken jockey anyone?), you’ll also meet NPCs in the nearby town, each with their own profession and tastes. The variety of vendors is as wide as the activities. And yes, there is romance, so don’t worry your lonesome heart.
On top of this, you’ll have quest-like tasks to complete which will net you rewards such as money and resources. There’s also a calendar system with events like birthdays and town gatherings, and even the passage of seasons, which does affect your farming. Having meaningful gameplay changes attached to timed events is such a simple yet challenging thing to implement, but Cattle Country seems to hit it on the mark.
Visuals
It is a bit obvious to say, but Cattle Country does seem to take a lot of inspiration from Stardew Valley. There’s too many similarities for this to be a coincidence. The premise of starting a farm on your own in a new community is shared between the games. There is also a visual resemblance, beyond just the pixel art style of both games. Though I will say, Cattle Country gives off more of a third-generation Pokémon game vibe than Stardew Valley. Ultimately, the western theme is what differentiates Cattle Country from other farming sims rather than mechanics or visuals.
I do really like the retro art style that pixel graphics emulate, and Cattle Country does a good job of doing this. Though, as I mentioned before, there is a resemblance to Stardew Valley, from the top-down perspective, to the very similar user interface.
Regardless, Cattle Country does have very pleasing visuals. Every color is vibrant and pops out on the screen. There are also lighting effects that correspond with the day-night cycle. These can be very pleasant to look at, especially in the evening, though they do have moments of oversaturation. By this, I mean that the visual effects are sometimes too strong, particularly in the morning, and make it a bit hard to see what’s actually going on.
Audio
What little voice acting there is in game is done very well. There’s some narration at the beginning with a typical cowboy accent that welcomes you and sets the scene. It’s a smooth and warm introduction to the game.
The gameplay and background audio in Cattle Country is strange. For the most part it’s not bad, but there are a few spots of trouble. Most of the time you’ll be accompanied by plucky banjo melodies and ambient nature sounds. However, sometimes the music just cuts out and doesn’t loop again, leaving just the ambient sound going.
Glitches aside, the ambience is fitting, there’s sounds of cicadas, wind blowing, and flowing water. However, the repeated noise of the cicadas can easily get annoying, so I recommend lowering the slider for ambient noise just a bit from the defaults.
Conclusions
Cattle Country is all around a functional, enjoyable game. However, it does little to innovate on an already established farming sim formula. If you like games like Stardew Valley, then I would recommend at least trying Cattle Country to see if it scratches that same itch. You won’t find a particularly exciting experience, but you might enjoy a calm, wholesome game.
